IDM365 is in the Cloud

Are you struggling to make your application, or application portfolio, scalable, failover ready, and/or compliant with IT environmental certification? If so, the following will be of interest to you.

The challenges mentioned above are namely issues that cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure™, have placed serious focus on.

Why talk cloud from our perspective as an IDM/IAM/IAG specialist? To begin with, identity and access management, access governance, as well as maintenance of the structure involved, all present some universal challenges that extend to the cloud. There are many interesting concepts and issues that need to be taken into consideration first before implementing a cloud strategy. This involves thoroughly investigating and defining how identities will be provisioned in a smooth and secure way.

As a global vendor of identity and access management, we have had to look very thoroughly into the many facets of cloud integration – investigating the market, varied requirements, and possible partners – in order to decide on a cloud strategy. Our choice came down to Microsoft Azure™, and here are a few reasons why:

How does Microsoft Azure defeat the challenges?

Challenge 1: Your application needs the ability to adjust so that usage spikes will not affect end users.

Azure fully supports dynamic changes to the machine power underneath your applications. You can monitor usage, configure alerts and define rules for scaling up and down. Check out Troy Hunt’s great article about rapidly scaling websites with Azure for a more in-depth look at why this is important.

Challenge 2: Your application has a guaranteed uptime requirement that means it needs to stay alive even if a hosting machine unexpectedly crashes.

Challenge 3: Your application’s infrastructure and processes need to comply with certain official IT environmental certifications.

IT certification varies greatly depending on the industry you are in and the kind of data you are storing. Azure is one of the only Cloud platforms with an outspoken strategy on wanting to comply with all the various certification models such as SAS 70 and HIPAA. Being compliant to these standards can be very costly and troublesome, but Azure already has you covered. You can see an overview of some of the considerations Microsoft has dealt with, as well as the certifications they have already achieved in last year’s overview entitled “Microsoft Azure Security, Privacy, & Compliance” found on the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) website.

What is outlined above are the major challenges a Cloud solution will solve for you, but that is far from all. The cloud opens up many possibilities that simplify problems or eliminate them altogether. Some of these possibilities will be covered in another article.

IDM365 and Azure – Better Together

We know how the above challenges can place a daily burden on owners of all kinds of applications, so we have done our best to make the IDM365 implementation a painless process no matter the infrastructure. To that end, IDM365 has been made fully compatible with Azure, allowing it to be deployed directly into your new or existing Azure cloud setup. Implementing our product with Azure will therefore not only solve your challenges with identity and access management, but do so in a way that is fully scalable, reliable, and compliant across the board.